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Many entrepreneurs think that business growth has to occur slowly. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I coach large numbers of entrepreneurs every year, and time and time again I have seen people achieve stupendous levels of growth in a very short period of time.

So How Do CEOs and Entrepreneurs Grow Their Businesses Fast?

There’s many ways super fast growth can be achieved, but I’ll outline 4 of the most crucial ones below.

1. Raise Your Personal Performance Standards

It’s easy to get a little slack when it comes to driving your own daily performance at work.

Your business might be going quite well, without much of your effort or perhaps you’ve been running it for many years and you’re just bored by what you’re selling. Pretty soon you’ve relaxed too much and started functioning at a sub optimum level.

It shows in small ways: you arrive a little later to work, you settle for lower product standards. You don’t give a sales presentation everything you’ve got. And before long you aren’t performing brilliantly, you’re coasting and taking it a bit too easy.

The solution is to take a step back, evaluate your performance, and if you find it lacking decide to recommit to personal excellence.

What do I mean by that?

I mean make a conscious decision to do every important thing at work to the very highest standards of excellence. When you as the owner of the business decide to lift your performance level, you’ll find everyone around you (staff, suppliers, even clients) will lift theirs.

But if you accept low standards from yourself, all those you work with will function at a lower level too.

Believe me, all great business results start inside the head of the business owner. They see a vision of themselves as outstanding entrepreneurs then endeavor to make that vision a reality. If you don’t start with a personal vision of excellence, great achievement is simply impossible.

So step one is to lift your ideals, aims and standards and everything else will rise in accordance with that vision.

2. Focus On No More Than 3 Key Areas Of Your Business

Too many CEO’s spread themselves too thin. They aim to do everything and end up achieving almost nothing.

While in some ways it’s admirable that a business owner wants every part of their business to get better, the reality is they usually need to focus on just getting a tiny number of critical things right. If they choose those wisely their business growth will be spectacular.

Where do you focus? Well start with these three areas:

How to get more qualified leads.

How to convert those leads into customers more often.

How to get those customers to purchase again.

Think about it. If you just got these three aspects of your business running magnificently, imagine how much wealth you could create.

Now let’s do a little test: How much of your time each week is presently dedicated to these three crucial areas? Probably less than 20%.

So often, business owners get caught up in all the other stuff that seems important at the time, but in the end doesn’t really improve your profits. That’s plain crazy. Get focused on what matters and don’t let yourself get distracted with the endless business trivia.

3. Get More Administration Help

Entrepreneurs tend to do too much themselves. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen the heads of businesses waste hours doing tasks that a low level assistant could have done. And they wonder why they are still at work at 7.30pm!

You must stop doing what doesn’t matter. Hire an assistant (part time if your cashflow is low) and load them up with all the tasks that take you away from making money: looking for stuff on the internet, typing, tidying, answering unimportant emails. etc etc.

You’re not saving money, you’re losing money – if you had somebody to help you you could double or even triple the amount of time you spend growing the business.

Here’s an interesting story. Years ago I had left the company I co-owned after a disagreement with my then business partner. I didn’t know what company I was going to open next, so I rented an office space and then hired not one but two personal assistants.

Now some people would say that was a ridiculous waste of money – after all, I didn’t even have a business at that point. But I saw things differently.

As soon as they started I got them working on any business idea I could think of – researching, organizing and reporting back to me. After awhile I began to work out what my next venture would be and I hit that business with massive momentum. With those assistants helping me I was able to concentrate on what mattered most – developing a new killer business.

Isn’t it time you got some help? To achieve great things you must give yourself the time to think of great things. And it’s very hard to do that if you’re handling a mountain of urgent and low level tasks yourself.

4. Develop Something Else To Sell

If your company has grown to more than $1 million in revenue, often the fastest way to grow faster is to sell an additional product to your customer base. Is it not true that you probably have numerous customers who would buy a second product from you, if only you offered it to them?

After all they already know your company. They like what it does. And they believe in your staff and what you’re aiming to do.

That should make it pretty easy to convince a fair amount of them to take a look at something else you’ve been developing for them.

Disney did this by creating a Disney cruise line. Apple did it by adding the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch. Porsche did it by creating an SUV for the family.

As soon as you begin thinking along this vein, you’ll quickly come up with some promising ideas. Simply ask yourself: what else would my customers buy from me? Then choose something that is easy for you to produce or offer within your current way of operating. (You don’t want to radically change how your company works just to try a new product).

What’s an easy way of finding out what else your customers want? Why not survey them and actually ask them. They’ll appreciate that you bothered to seek their opinion and you’ll get some valuable intel.

The faster you increase your product offering, the quicker new and greater revenue will come in.
Now none of these four ways to build your business quickly are particularly difficult.

And at least 3 of them could be done within a week (developing a new product will probably take a little longer).

So why not give them a try? If you do it’s almost certain that within a very short period of time you’ll have both a bigger business and a better run one.

Although I mentor CEO’s and entrepreneurs from a vast array of industries, there’s one mistake that I constantly see, no matter what kind of business they run.

This mistake is so prevalent, I’d estimate that at least 8 out of 10 business leaders make this error, often at great financial cost.

Here it is: They get caught up handling their current business and therefore don’t spend nearly enough time getting new business.

This usually means that every few months they run short of customers, then have to scramble desperately to get more income in.

Because they do not hunt new customers constantly, their revenue becomes sporadic, spluttering between feast and famine. (This can be incredibly stressful on the CEO or entrepreneur).

Although they often blame the economy, or increasing competition for their hardship, the real reason their business is suffering is because they are using their time incorrectly.

They are responding to immediate issues, like client requests, or staff complaints, instead of focusing on new sales. Of course client and staff issues have to be handled, but they should not be put in front of the real task at hand: growing the enterprise.

To do that, you must have “The Growth Mindset”:

As the esteemed management guru Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” If we spend all our time managing our customers that leaves no time to create new ones.

This is all very well in theory, you might be thinking, but day to day how can I do this?

The answer is you need to create a simple, not overly arduous diary structure, that builds in times of the week where you work on getting new business in the door. And stick to it.

One very elementary but highly effective way of doing this is to diarise the first hour of every work day as ‘Business Building Time’. Commit to devoting this hour each and every work day solely to sales and marketing efforts. (You can either spend the time brainstorming new ways to get customers or spend it working on already existing sales generating systems.)

Why I like to recommend this method to the entrepreneurs I mentor is that it’s easy to yield great results with it.

It takes hardly any time. It’s at the beginning of the day so you’re likely to get it done. And because it’s in the morning you can bring a fresh mind to it.

With just this one change to your day you can literally transform your business. After several months of using this system you will have dramatically improved your new business machine. New business leads will be coming in consistently, your confidence will skyrocket and your revenues will be greatly enhanced.

But if you don’t do this, or a simple, consistent system like it, then your business is likely to go on as it always has.

For most CEO’s and entrepreneurs that means slow and occasional growth. Nothing disastrous happens to their profits, but not much exciting happens either.

So give my system a try. It’s ridiculously easy. Yet it may just revolutionize your company’s speed of growth.

Want to Avoid The Biggest Mistakes CEOs and Entrepreneurs Make Building Their Companies?

As Apple continues to grow from strength to strength, now is a good time to analyze what Tim Cook is doing right.

Here is my view of the key differences between the way Cook works versus the typical CEO or company owner.

1. He Puts Building A Great Company Ahead Of Building A Great Share Price.

Tim Cook has repeatedly stressed that he views endless speculation about the share price as an unwelcome distraction from the real task at hand – producing and selling world changing products. As he expressed it, “Companies that get confused, that think their goal is revenue or stock price or something. You have to focus on the things that lead to those things.”

And even more stridently,” If you want me to only do things for ROI reasons then you should get out of this stock.”

2. He Only Releases A Product When It Is Truly Outstanding.

A case in point is the Apple watch. Cook was under tremendous pressure early last year to announce a release date for the Apple timepieces. He resisted, even when he knew that competitors were working on similar products, because he knew that the product wasn’t yet good enough. Then when he finally announced the watch range, he still did not rush it’s release into the market.

3. He Is Obsessively Focused On Only A Few Products.

Compare Apple with Samsung. The shear breadth of Samsung’s product range is stunning, but Tim Cook takes an entirely different tact. He is ruthless at saying no to new products, unless Apple can not only produce the best in that category, but actually redefine what that category is.

As he put it, “You can only do so many things great, and you should cast aside everything else.” And again: “But the DNA of the company, the thing that makes our heart beat, is a maniacal focus on making the best products in the world. Not good products, or a lot of products,but the absolute best products in the world.”

4. He Refuses To Lower Prices For Market Share.

Few industries are under more pressure to reduce prices than the computer sector. But again and again Tim Cook resists. He understands that price lowering is a game that is impossible to win and once begun is extremely difficult to stop. It also means reduced margins, which inevitably lead to lower product quality, which in turn lead to lower customer satisfaction.

Cook is adamant that moving away from premium pricing would greatly erode the Apple brand. “Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it and the joy is gone.”

5. He Plays The Long Game, Keeping the Company’s Vision In Mind At All Times.

The defining characteristic of Tim Cook’s reign at Apple so far is surely his commitment to the Apple ethos. That philosophy is completely focused on product excellence, and Cook has been absolutely clear that he will stick with that vision for however long he runs the company. “Apple has a culture of excellence that is, I think, so unique and so special. I’m not going to witness or permit the change of it.”

Rather than just admire Tim Cook, why not take a moment now to examine each of the points above and compare them to how your company operates. How could you improve things thinking more like Tim? Which of these five areas should you focus on to take your company to the next level?

Tim Cook is indeed a masterful CEO, but he is following strategies that almost any company could also do.

I beg to differ. I coach hundreds of entrepreneurs every year, from a colossal range of industries, and I believe they all share 7 common character traits.

Importantly, each of these traits did not exist at birth, they were developed with time, intention and persistence.

Let’s go through these key traits now.

1. Reality Based Optimism.

As renowned psychologist Dr Barbara Fredrickson of the University Of North Carolina has shown, positivity is a choice – and an exceedingly important one. Those business leaders with strong inclinations toward positivity are more persistent and effective than entrepreneurs that are pessimistic. See also Martin Seligman’s research on optimism in the insurance industry for more evidence of the importance of thinking positively. Not a Pollyanna like blind optimism, but an overall positive outlook while accepting current realities.

2. Speed Bordering On The Reckless.

As Mark Zuckerberg famously put it, in these chaotic times executives need to “Move fast and break things”. Slow, methodical improvement can reap dividends of course, but for optimum business growth, those consistent and never ending small improvements need to be matched with an attitude of pushing the envelope of time. Zuckerberg’s theory has always been that ≈.

3. People Before Strategy.

When Alan Mulally took over at Ford, the company was in dire straits. While he was ruthless on costs and process, he surprised many at Ford with his equally strong emphasis on looking after staff. At his first major meeting with Ford’s most senior executives he put up a slide with ten key principles.At the top of the list was ‘People First’. Real progress would only occur, Mulally believed, when top management treated their staff superbly.

4. Data, Data, Data.

Twenty years ago there were certainly great entrepreneurs winging it – moving fast but not really evaluating the data. There are very few leaders in business performing that way now however. In every industry the top entrepreneurs have realized that far better decisions are made by gathering maximum data on sales, marketing, pricing, positioning and customer preference. That’s not to say that intuition is no longer important, far from it. But it needs to be balanced with logic formed from empirical intel.

5. Grand Persistence.

The biggest myth about successful business people is that they are more intelligent and talented. Having met many super rich entrepreneurs and read over a thousand books on business success I can tell you categorically that that is not the case. More often the great fortunes have been made by people of average intelligence who had tremendous drive, matched with almost ridiculous levels of persistence. As high performance expert Denis Waitley expressed it, “Success is almost totally dependent on drive and persistence. The extra energy required to try another effort or another approach is the secret to winning.”

6. Confident Contrarianism.

It’s hard to make a lot of money in business just doing things a little bit better than your competition. Usually the big fortunes have been accrued by taking a vastly different path from other companies in the sector. It takes real confidence to go against the pack. What looks obvious in a decade, often seems absurdly dangerous at the time.

7. Long Term Time Perspective.

The get rich quick crowd rarely make it big in business. Read the biographies of Edison, Ford, Walton, Ellison, Kamprad et al and you’ll discover tales of long struggle over decades. Some may have given the impression it was easy but that is rarely the case. Substantial and enduring business success usually takes a long time – experimenting, failing, then beginning anew with more refined solutions.

(Character trait number two has a curious relationship with trait number seven. The great entrepreneurs act urgently, like they have no time left, yet work like this for decades, making their business successful).

Which of these seven traits do you have? Which do you need to consciously develop more? A few minutes spent evaluating your situation regarding these traits now could reap great dividends in the future.

Sometimes building a highly profitable business is easier than it looks.

We so often think the answer to growing our company is working longer hours and doing much more work, but in my experience coaching hundreds of business leaders and entrepreneurs on growth, is it’s often the really simple, easy steps that make the biggest difference.

With that in mind, here are four small things you can do that together will make a huge improvement to how fast your company grows.

1. Find A Richer Customer

What product could you offer especially for wealthier clients?

Strangely, people who are wealthier are often easier to sell to than those who are struggling financially. Opening the wallet doesn’t hurt as much. But if you don’t have something good to offer this richer style of customer you are leaving huge amounts of money on the table.

Remember also that a more expensive product usually means much higher margins for you, so while you’re revenue may increase say 20% with this new upscale product your profit at the end of the year may be much higher.

2. Develop A Continuity Business Model

One of the most effective ways to quickly build your profits is to design a service or product that is continuously delivered. If you sell a service, this is usually achieved by selling a monthly retainer for ongoing work. If you sell a product it’s by getting customers to sign on for monthly or quarterly re-orders.

In the case of the latter, it is remarkable how you can turn almost anything you sell into a continuity model. Look on the internet and you’ll find highly successful monthly continuity models for clothes, gifts, advice, socks, meat, wine, DVDs, events and hundreds of other categories.

What could you offer that is delivered monthly or quarterly? This kind of recurring revenue is a mega opportunity to not only lift your revenues but keep them high year after year.

3. Reactivate Old Clients Or Leads

In the last week alone I have seen two of our business coaching clients (a builder and a tennis academy) get lucrative orders within hours of sending an email to their old list of leads/customers.

Think about it. Many of these people are still interested in what you offer, they just need to be reminded that you offer it. Re-activating your old enquiries and clients is one of the fastest ways of all to make your profit levels zoom. Be sure to do it every six months.

4. Do Something To Grow Your Customer Base Before 10am

You know how it goes. You have wonderful intentions to work on your sales and marketing but the urgent problems of the day soon take over and all of a sudden it’s 6pm and another day has gone without doing it.
There’s an easy way to fix this incredibly costly problem: work for an hour on sales and marketing as soon as you come into work each morning. Just one hour will make a massive difference to your company’s growth over three months – but it must be done each and every work day.

The best way to make it occur is firstly to diarize it and secondly to inform your staff (and if need be your clients and suppliers) that you’re not available until 10am each day. If you don’t do these two things my experience with coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs is that it won’t work.

Take another look at the four concepts above.

Yes these four small changes are simple, but since when does something have to be complex to be effective? Trust me, if you instill these four concepts into your business you will make a lot more money- surprisingly quickly and with relative ease.

And yet in my experience this one simple technique can grow a business faster and more efficiently than almost any other way.

What is this method? It is simply this: Do more of what’s working.

As simplistic as it sounds, time and time again I see entrepreneurs that have worked out a way to get clients or sell products that works pretty well – only to start experimenting with some other growth technique.

No. Resist that urge to constantly move on to another methodology. Instead refocus on what’s working and see how you can make it work twice as well.

For example if you have an ad that pulls in customers, why not run it three times as much?

If cold calls get you good business, consider hiring a second person to do that all day long.

If Google Adwords is bringing in good enquiries every week, then keep testing new ads until you fully optimize that revenue medium.

Seems obvious right?

Yet in my experience teaching hundreds of entrepreneurs almost no entrepreneurs are maxmizing growth techniques that are working for them. Instead they are enamoured with trying new stuff, often in a shallow and half hearted way.

So don’t just try lots of new ways to grow your business. Look at what’s working and spend your time there first.

You’ll find it’s the absolute easiest and quickest way to grow your business.

Elite sports men and women work on their minds as a much as their bodies.

They are well aware that when they get their minds right, superior performance usually follows.

So why don’t business people do the same?

Is it not highly likely that if we also used the tools of sport psychologists in the business environment that we could enhance our performance?

You bet it is.

Here’s a list of the main techniques used by sport psychologists. Peruse them and pick three that you would feel would help you work faster, smarter and better.

1. Smart Goal Setting

Make sure you set clear, achievable goals that stretch you to perform at your best, then articulate a step by step plan for achieving each of them.

2. Mental Imagery

Take a few minutes day to mentally ‘see’ moving pictures of you performing superbly. As noted sports performance shrink Dr Jim Afremow has shown, personal performance can dramatically improve when we consistently rehearse mentally.

3. Breath Control

When you breath slowly and deeply, your mood never fails to calm down. Breath control is a rarely discussed secret to high performance, yet it’s a critical component of top best sports psychologist Dr Michael Gervais.

4. Champion’s Body Language

How you move greatly affects your mood. Carry yourself like a champion and you’ll begin to think like a champion. (For more on this check out Neuro Linguistic Programming).

5. Correct Intensity

Monitor your intensity level, making sure it’s just right for the situation. Not too tight, not too relaxed.6. Internal Talk

Always speak to yourself in a positive, can do, encouraging manner. It pays to talk to be your own best supporter. Constantly be uplifting and supporting yourself through your internal dialogue.

7. Enjoyment

Business is a long game, if we don’t enjoy each day then our performance will eventually suffer. Interestingly, as British positive psychology expert Dr Robert Holden often emphasizes, enjoyment is largely a choice, it’s not purely determined by our circumstances. Top performers choose to enjoy every day.

Okay, these techniques in my view are The Magnificent Seven of elite sports performance.

Which ones could help you perform more effectively in business?

Pick three and focus on them over the next week. Then watch your business performance soar.

Use these three methods and within a month you should have more customers.

1. Offer A Free Report Prominently On Your Website

Over 94% of people who visit your company’s website will leave without contacting you.

That’s an extraordinary figure worth thinking long and hard about.

If most website visitors don’t contact you, isn’t it vitally important to grab their contact details?

The best way to do this is to offer them a free report. By merely leaving their email details they would receive a report answering many of their biggest questions about your product, service or industry.

Give it a provocative headline. For example, if you own a legal firm, make the report’s headline something like ‘The 3 Biggest Mistakes People Make Hiring A Lawyer’ and you’re sure to get plenty of sign ups.

Once you have their email address, you can begin to communicate with them and build the relationship.

2. Test A Google Adwords Campaign

There is no faster way to get customers than Google Adwords. Literally within a few hours of setting up your Adwords campaign you could be making sales.

Yet surprisingly, most companies do no Adwords marketing at all.

It’s ridiculously cheap too. You can try an Adwords campaign for a few hundred dollars. If it works, increase your budget. If it doesn’t, then it hasn’t cost you much.

There really is no reason not to at least experiment with Adwords – there’s a super low cost and a huge upside. How do you get started with Adwords? I suggest watching a few of the short ‘How To’ videos at google.com/adwords.

3. Get Other Websites To Write An Article About You

There are broadly two types of websites: those that produce information and those that promote specific companies.

The ones that produce information (it could be about fashion, business, family, culture or specific interest topics) all have one thing in common: they are always looking for new articles.

So think of a few article ideas that involve your company (it could be an interview, a controversial aspect of your industry, a warning, or just some useful tips) and pitch it to the head of the site.

If one of your ideas is good and relevant to their audience, they will frequently run with it. After all, every day they need to fill their site with more fresh content.

All three of these online marketing methods are quick, simple and inexpensive, yet few companies do any of them.

If you want to improve your company’s bottom line, pick one of them and test it this week. Who knows, it could very well bring in a flood of customers.

* Dedicated to company-wide communication. “Everyone has to know the plan, it’s status and areas that need attention.”

Have a think about this list. Ask yourself, what is Alan doing that I can incorporate into my own leadership style? Then pick the most important of these points and focus on it for the next 2 weeks. Then move to the next attribute you’d like to emulate.

We can all learn from the best – and Alan Mulally shines as a uncommon breed of CEO – one who has achieved stupendous results while at the same time being liked by the vast majority in his company. A rare achievement indeed.

If you’re not happy with your progress, here are some great ideas for getting your profits moving fast.

1. Spend Three Hours A Day Calling Potential Buyers.

In my experience, 80% of businesses suffer from the owner not spending enough time connecting with people who can write a cheque. If your business isn’t growing then get on the phone and reach out to potential clients. It’s not fancy, and for many it’s scary, but generally it will get the cash registers ringing faster than any other method.

2. Do Low Cost Google Adwords Experiments.

One of the best aspects of Google’s Adwords program is that it’s so damn cheap to try it out. You don’t need thousands of dollars, you can run a decent test with just a few hundred dollars. That means there’s no excuse for not at least giving it a go.

It’s easy to find some good instructional videos about Adwords online – watch a couple of them and give it a go. For many entrepreneurs the switch to Adwords has revolutionized their business.

3. Work Only On New Business Until 11AM.

The trouble with most businesses is that they have become havens for paperwork, meetings and bureaucracy. Too often entrepreneurs get caught up in all this non sales related activity then suddenly realize the day has ended and the company once again has not increased it’s revenue .

This needs to stop. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a rule that you and the key stakeholders in your company spend their mornings until 11am on income increasing activities. Unless you do this important stuff first each day you will usually find it doesn’t get done at all.

4. Introduce The Closed Door Policy.

Managers everywhere are always talking that they have an open door policy – staff can come by and visit them anytime. Forget it. being that available will fragment your thinking and fill the day up with the non vital. Close your door and get to work in silence for at least three 90 minute blocks of time. Yes, it’s hard to discipline yourself to do this, but the future growth of your enterprise depends on it.

5. Constantly See Yourself As A Top Level Entrepreneur.

You will only be as successful as your self identity allows. Nobody can consistently perform at a higher level than they deep down believe they should be at.

So be careful what you think about yourself. As high performance expert Brendon Burchard puts it, “Don’t let your small business make you small minded”. Work on your self image, treat yourself as a top level business person and then behave in accordance with that vision. In the end, business success is a mental game – you need to take the time to work on your positive mindset daily.

Give these tips the 30 day test. Live them for the next month and see how quickly they can improve your business.